AMD makes quarterly profit on chips for PS4 and Xbox One

AMD has managed to make a quarterly profit for the second time in a row. Once again, the good figures were mainly due to the supply of chips for the consoles from Microsoft and Sony. Sales of these custom embedded chips now make up 20 percent of the turnover.

The good quarterly figures were therefore mainly the result of the successful introduction of the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony, both of which have AMD chips on board. “Combined, Sony and Microsoft have sold more than 7 million units in less than two months,” AMD CEO Rory Read said while discussing the numbers. “We expect the good sales to continue and will be providing more custom game console SOCs this year and acquiring new customers for them.”

The Graphical and Visual Solutions business made more than five times the profit in the last quarter of 2013 compared to the same quarter the previous year, while revenue was 2.5 times higher. AMD makes no distinction in its numbers, but the company said demand for its graphics chips was also high. This may be influenced by the high demand for R9 video cards for mining Litecoins. In addition, AMD said that many manufacturers will use the new R7 and R9 GPUs for laptops, without mentioning details.

Read said the extensive reorganization at AMD has been completed and the company will focus this year on embedded and semi-custom chips, professional GPUs, energy-efficient SOCs and server chips. AMD expects little from the PC market. The first samples of the server chips based on the ARM architecture should appear this quarter, while the first 64-bit server chips based on ARM will also be released this year.

The quarterly profit came in at 65 million euros on a turnover of 1.17 billion euros. In 2013, AMD will end up with a loss, equivalent to 54 million euros. Last year’s total turnover amounted to 3.9 billion euros.